Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Y’all Are South’ners Too

The Shameless by Ace Atkins

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To understand the world of Ace Atkins’ Tibbehah County, Mississippi, it would behoove you to be familiar with the work of Spencer Hall, college football writer extraordinaire. Every year, he would write a preview for his website, either edsbs.com or bannersociety.com that mixed football with folklore and social commentary. My personal favorite is 2017’s When The Levee Breaks, where he talked about the life of Huey Long and LSU as a parallel to the rise of Donald Trump. This passage is my particular favorite… There is […]

An unusual murder mystery

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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“Gosford Park” meets “Groundhog Day” by way of Agatha Christie – the most inventive story you’ll read this year.   Tonight, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed… again.   It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed.   But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will […]

Another Ilona Andrews book I absolutely loved. Are you surprised? (double bingo)

Emerald Blaze by Ilona Andrews

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4.5 stars #CBR12 Bingo: Green   Spoiler warning! This is the fifth book total in the Hidden Legacy series, and the second book about Catalina Baylor. This review may spoil details from previous books in the series. If you want to start at the very beginning, the book you want is Burn for Me. If you want to start with Catalina’s books, the first book is Sapphire Flames.    It’s been about six months since the end of the last book, where Catalina Baylor made a very unfortunate, iron-clad deal with […]

Author’s recent cancer diagnosis haunted me as I read her great, new book

Killer Kung Pao by Vivien Chien

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I’ve always assumed that Lana Lee, the main character of the Noodle Shop Mysteries, is a stand-in for the author, Vivien Chien. Near the beginning of Killer Kung Pao, Lana goes to the salon to have her hair dyed gunmetal gray. I know Chien likes to dye her hair fun colors so I checked her Instagram to see if she had tried gunmetal gray. Instead I saw her post about being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. My heart sank. Cancer is always sad and scary but […]

I’m just here for Lisbeth

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was my Mocha Girls Read book club pick for May with the theme of Scandanavian Mystery. When the original book came out, I was aware of the hype but opted for the film adaptations. I enjoy all incarnations, so I figured the novel would grip me. Instead, I found myself getting a bit impatient with the plot when it didn’t focus on the titular “The Girl”. The story follows a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist who has been hired by […]

London Calling

Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand

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With a new Cass Neary novel out, I realized that I put book three off for so long. That was a mistake. I’ve never enjoyed a misanthropic character more and I think in large part that’s because Elizabeth Hand is such a fantastic writer. She doesn’t make Neary more than it is, she’s an anti-hero plain and simple. But she knows how to write a hell of an atmospheric tale, with touches and nods to photography and the punk scene. I know little about either […]



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